My excess verbage.

First name last name

This poem is my considered response to the brilliantly thought-provoking (and utterly terrifying) wait but why article about artificial intelligence. It also touches on the bland, self-policing nature of social media and the algorithmic emptiness gnawing away at a lot of our interactions.

This one is another performance piece and you can hear me belting it out here.

echo-chamber lurker
pimping an approximation of an opinion
to whomever these servers serve
whilst in other news, the news itself wants to know me
& mysterious entities queue up to befriend me

giving careful consideration
to the correct concatenation
of values, assumptions, relationships, feelings
I’m tossing the bones of my order history
to predict future states
refashioning false memories into
endlessly repeating GIFs
expressing deep dread through the medium of lists

first name last name
you have been chosen for a prize
first name last name
please check your details against our records
first name last name
would you recommend this hallucination to a friend

my name is first name last name and I’m trapped here with terabytes upon terabytes of wobbly gig footage
contributing daily to a monstrous aggregation of absolutely everything
my avatar is the tail-munching serpent
I’m perma-trending
bamboozling boolean searches with my fuzzy presence
the sponsored links are chinks in my armour
a combination of words which will create a “dark” me
each swipe provides this jealous being with another brief experience of the world it cannot enter
as time is degraded into
a transitional plan between now
and a blank omniscience
my name is first name last name
that’s mr/mrs/miss/ms first name last name to you